SpaceX President: Prospect of Another Failure 'Keeps Me Up at Night'

Ever since SpaceX had its first launch failure in late June, those following the company have wondered it would shelve some of its more ambitious short-term plans in favor of focusing solely on returning to space safely. The answer, according to SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, is absolutely not.

Though there's still no timetable for the next Falcon 9 rocket launch, Shotwell confirmed Monday that the company is moving forward with a plan to upgrade to a next-generation rocket, tentatively called the "Full Performance Falcon 9," which is 30 percent more powerful than the version of the rocket it's been flying.

Shotwell also said that the company is still focused on landing the rocket's first stage (the part of the rocket that takes it off the launch pad) on a drone boat by the end of the year, which is ambitious considering the company has, at most, a couple of launches left before 2016.

"A big challenge at SpaceX is to maintain the fast pace of innovation while we're executing our critical manifest for our customers. By definition, what ends up winning, of course, is executing our manifest for our customers," Shotwell said at the AIAA Space conference in California Monday. "How do we make sure we continue down our high risk, high gain path while still doing highly reliable, predictable launches for our customers?"

The answer, it seems, is to double down on its risk assessments and to do a "deep dive" into its supply chain to determine any possible places where another failure could occur. The company says that a faulty, third-party strut caused the June failure, which Shotwell called an "easy problem to go fix."

"I want to see a Falcon 9 first stage land on a drone ship or land on my landing site," she said. "If you don't get reusability to work, it's a one-way trip to Mars, and that's not the way you want to go. I want to stick a landing this year."

By keeping an eye on the future—more powerful, reusable rockets are critical to SpaceX's long-term commercial success and to its Mars plans—Shotwell realizes the company is potentially taking a big short-term risk. Analysts have said that a second consecutive failure could be catastrophic to both the company's reputation and its bottom line, and it seems Shotwell knows that.

"Our next flight will both be a return to flight and the first flight of the upgraded vehicle," she said. "When people ask what keeps me up at night, it's that flight."

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified Gwynne Shotwell as the CEO of SpaceX. She is the president of the company, Elon Musk is the CEO and founder.